


Guide Me Down Our Lonely Road

by SilverHounds



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Established Relationship, F/M, Heavy Angst, Internal Conflict, Mage Hawke (Dragon Age), Mage-Templar War (Dragon Age), Sided with Mages, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:40:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverHounds/pseuds/SilverHounds
Summary: In the aftermath of Kirkwall’s mage uprising, Anders and Hawke are two fugitives traveling alone together while the Mage-Templar War rages on throughout Thedas.Forgiveness is a hard gift to grant, but Hawke’s love for Anders is the only thing she has left worth fighting for.
Relationships: Anders/Female Hawke, Anders/Hawke (Dragon Age)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	1. Your Heartbeat Is My Dirty Little Secret

_If Hawke closed her eyes, she could almost convince herself the moment was one of intimacy._

_Anders’s heartbeat–the heartbeat she had fallen asleep to for countless nights, each better than the previous night; the heartbeat she had cradled so carefully in her hands, knowing its owner wasn’t used to gentleness; the heartbeat which somehow summed up all she was and all she ever hoped to be and all she’d ever cared about in tiny rhythmic beats–was right next to her head, thumping softly away in the dip of his throat. That was what struck her first about it. What horrified her most, really: his complete lack of fear._

_Oh, Hawke knew fear. It was a friend older and more loyal than even Varric himself, and though she’d never played card games with it and had all her coin stolen in a form of legal theft, or gotten into drinking competitions, it followed her from childhood into her Champion years. She knew how to inspire fear, how to extort it, and how to strip back all the bloody layers and see the glimpse of terror, always present in men, no matter how much armor they wore._

_But Anders’s heartbeat didn’t throb violently below his skin, leaping into his throat in an effort to get free. It was just a stutter, a tiny little stutter. Nervousness, maybe. He was no more than nervous about her taking his life. And the mind in his head was one of defeat, a limp resignation to whatever sentence fate saw fit to give him in return for his deeds._

_Here was a man who wanted to die. Or, at least, didn’t give half a damn if he did. And that was hardly any less horrifying._

_Man, abomination, criminal...the man she loved or the man who had incited an uprising so massive and hungry it wouldn’t stop until it had swallowed Kirkwall and every last inch of the Free Marches and beyond. For so long, Hawke had knowingly ignored their suspicion and whispers of warning; he might have been an apostate, but so she was she. If he was a heretic, so was she. If they wanted to hunt the lover who shared the Champion’s bed, then she would never hesitate to retaliate, leveraging the riches and formidable standing her Meredith-granted title afforded her to take apart the throne of their Templar oppressors._

_But now those two images of Anders, supposed to remain forever separate, were blurring before her eyes. The same warm amber eyes that had once promised her honesty were now permanently tainted with deceit that left a nauseating taste in her mouth. The same coat she had cried into after Leandra’s death, wrinkled from her tight hold and damp from her tears, was now marred with both blood she could see and a lot she couldn’t. Whether innocent blood or the blood of murderers, it was still blood. Still his burden to answer for, should she decide to move the knife closer._

_‘Should’._

_Had to._

_Everyone put the pressure of deciding Anders’s punishment squarely on her, and yet she knew they would be outraged if she opted not to slaughter the one she loved. The mages and Orsino were no fans of his. To them, he was simply a deadly outlier who had usurped the system at the cost of their heads. It was wholly his fault they now had the Annulment bearing down on them. She was given the honor of playing executioner because they assumed they already knew what she would choose._

_Hawke was trapped between a rock and a hard place, so to speak, and no matter what she did, somebody was going to be angry. Somebody was always fucking angry._

_She couldn’t._

_Not anymore. Not with this, not with him, not with Anders. She had spilled her guts, worked her body to perfection and to utter exhaustion, and sacrificed all semblance of proper sanity for this city, but she refused to slit Anders’s throat on the altar they pushed her towards. She wasn’t the unfailingly selfless hero they would later tell about in historybooks. She was a mortal, capable of corruption and greed like the rest of them; and if they said she was a fool, if they said her childish infatuation made her abandon her senses and spare him out of some misguided, desperate love, then she would allow them to insult her as much as they like. Hawke could take a tarnished reputation. She could take a legacy of foolishness and loathing. She could throw all of what she’d built away in this one fit of impulsion because Anders, that flawed, potentially possessed, sad excuse of a man with a fire burning in him and a cause he was very ready to die for, was the one thing shining bright as Kirkwall’s remains rained down around them._

_Hawke’s hands trembled. The dagger, small and unassuming as it seemed at first glance, was heavier than any material she could fathom. And relief, relief was prominent too–she didn’t have to pretend she could stand upright with an unbearable weight crushing her. She quietly withdrew the edge of her blade from the delicate strip at Anders’s ribs, near his sternum; and how sickening it was to think she had gotten into position without conscious thought, her body naturally angling itself for the ideal point in which she could shove her knife hilt-deep, where she could sever the most vital arteries, where he would bleed greatest and die fastest._

_Breath shallow, face ghostly white, Hawke tried to return her dagger to its sheath on her leg. Tried. She gave her orders to an arm frozen in motion. She was taken over by another force entirely, and Kirkwall subtly darkened around the helpless mage, her a struggling captive sat in witness as the silhouettes of everything else faded away into the background. Anders was the center of this stage, the masterpiece in comparison to dull blurs of shadow and noise. And Hawke’s arm?_

_It moved without her slightest consent, returning to brush against Anders’s neck, then trailing lower, gripping the haft of the dagger as she–without hesitation–plunged it into his back, the stench of fresh blood rushing to her nose, her hands growing sticky with a splatter of what she refused to believe was—_

Fuck.

 _“See what love gets you, girl?” An inexplicable voice struck inside her skull, pain blooming across her temples. Her surroundings were murky, like she was underwater, suffocating slowly and beating against impossible odds to be heard or seen and pulled from the deep water before her dwindling oxygen supply ran empty. “See where? Your grandiose title couldn’t save you from the horrors of your own failure. It was just a coverup. A facade. The people think you their Champion, but they don’t know what_ I _know—you’re a coward. The ones you love die at your hands, over and over. Anders might as well be another insignificant mark on your death toll. But if you forget, I’ll remember. You can’t escape the truth. I’ll know: Anders is dead, and you killed him.”_

Hawke startled awake, eyes snapping open abruptly as she lunged upward from where she had lain dreaming. She groped around frantically in the blackness for respite, for an object to touch in order to convince herself that she was free from her confines, and yes, she was in control, and yes, she was happily, blissfully _alive._ But what her fingers bumped to her right was no staff. She doubted it was furniture unless furniture had suddenly emerged into a trend of being low to the ground, certainly not flat, and warm. People-warm. This table was certainly a quirky fellow; constructed out of lean, but wiry muscle in the shoulders, which was what she had smacked into. She heard muted, raspy breathing, and her mysterious figure squirmed faintly, curling into a smaller ball facing the opposite direction. He had apparently made a challenge of seeing how compact he could get.

Hawke slouched down, biting her lip to restrain her sigh; her nightmares hadn’t been decreasing since her lot had left the hell of Kirkwall in their dust. In fact, they had gotten intense enough she was worried she’d let loose a scream someday soon and Anders’s spirit would erupt in a frenzy, convinced she was crying out in terror from some imminent arrival of templars at their door rather than her stupid Fade ventures. Justice had enough to encourage his paranoia without her shaking and sweating every night in the bedroll mere feet away. But she couldn’t help where her sleeping mind wandered while she rested. She was a calling card to demons, her creeping dread and ongoing feud with herself luring them; irresistible to Fear and Despair, among others.

It was a big risk, with a discomforting chance of waking him..but unfairly tempting when she was still twitching from that memory of him motionless, gushing with blood by her dream-self’s doing. Hawke wasn’t scared of what tonight showed her. She was haunted recalling how close she’d come to killing him when her blade was actually pressed to him, when she had come to a crossroads in reality, and she could have so easily erased him from her reality. For eternity. No takebacks, no clever ways to fix what would have been her worst mistake. She would have had to live with that for the rest of her existence–and when she woke up at similar times, she would have no Anders sleeping beside her to assure her it was merely a bad image conjured up by a demon.

Strangely timid, Hawke reached across the divide. She was under no impression of Anders as a sleeper hard to rouse, or indeed, any type of sleeper. Most nights had amounted to each of them lying silently in their respective territory, an unspoken line cut straight down the middle not to be breached by either touch or by conversation, both too troubled to get the tiniest bit of sleep. Hawke was never good at pretending she was unaware of Anders’s internal torment. Thus, she laid there from sundown until it dawned on the horizon again; awkward and tense, feeling like she was nestled in a bed full of prickly nettles despite the quality of her mattress thereof.

Her fingertips just grazed the expanse of Anders’s wrist, wincing and hiding her frown, an empty, hollow sensation filling her when she personally felt how bony it was. She pressed a little into his pulse point, where his heart tirelessly beat; she felt a rush of heat seep into her cheeks for honestly believing it might not be. Hawke had never been more eager to make haste back across the unofficial border.

Hawke fumbled to kick off the blankets pinning her. She had sweat so much it had soaked into her clothes as well as her bedroll, and the disgusting moistness of it clung to her form. Baths were rarer than sovereigns to fugitives and far more valuable. She stripped off her torso down to her undershirt, then treaded the path across the threshold of the abandoned cabin they were staying in; mindful of her Mabari hound who was cluelessly snoring away, inclined to trip her up. Titus wouldn’t look kindly on his master if she fell flat on her ass atop him at Andraste knows what hour.

The window ahead could give Hawke a rough clue. It was darkness itself outside, a void of nothing her eyes could decipher excluding the sliver of moonlight coming in. Firmly nighttime.

Hawke was about to debate going back to bed when she heard an ominous creak of the floorboards. A lick of flame sparked in her palm, illuminating Anders’s absolutely sleepless face in the golden tone of the fire’s glow. His eyes were free of any fog saying he’d drifted off recently. His hair, though..that was rumpled and tangled with so many ghastly knots, she was surprised they hadn’t been outed by the apostate hair alone the instant they stepped inside a civilized town to restock between weeks of traveling through wilderness. His scruff had grown into what she would charitably call a full-blown young beard. Hawke matched, she would bet, but mirrors were a luxury and it wasn’t like Anders wanted to break their tension to make snarky comments on her shaving.

Anders was obviously reluctant to talk. He stared at her, and it was _raw._ He could do that to her. Expose her wounds, dig out the shit she thought she’d gotten a handle on and make her vulnerable. His mouth didn’t move and his lips scarcely parted, but he was still able to make her hear a hundred syllables regardless. And Hawke did the traditional Hawke-response, to say the least; closing as tightly as she could, being a stubborn shit and telling him _good luck getting in this second bubble, buddy._

He waited in contemplation for her to speak first, until finally Hawke shifted uneasily on her feet and met his eyes head-on, her voice dripping in sarcasm and an underlying bitterness she hadn’t intended. “Got bored feigning sleep, or..?”

Anders flinched minutely, shrinking back from her ire. “Justice woke me,” was all he gave for means of explanation. “He felt the disturbance in the Fade.”

Hawke turned away from him, pacing the cabin floor with agitated footsteps that shook the rotting wood as if she were a thunderstorm threatening to make the walls collapse. Once, she could have. Once, she was the storm, a furious and unrelenting might with the world bowed down before her in awe. She was omnipresent in Kirkwall, casting down her shadow over the daily lives of the city’s residents. She didn’t have to leave the Hightown estate to find her fingerprints on every conversation, every noble and every Darktown refuge indebted to their Champion, because if she hadn’t saved that citizen, given him coin when he was in a sorry state, or dueled the Arishok for his sake, then she had surely done so for his family. She was an apostate who could stroll casually through the Gallows, who could consort with blood mages and abominations for company without shaking when she greeted Commander Meredith.

Now, Hawke was a pitiable victim in the storm. She was caught up in the winds, bending to the providence of luck to see where her circumstances would put her after the conclusion of each day trudging roads across the map of Ferelden.

“What do you _want_ from me?” Hawke blurted out.

Anders’s eyebrows furrowed, his voice agonizingly soft, like he was afraid she’d walk away if he dared to talk a single note louder. “I’m not in a place to want anything, Hawke. You..you said you wanted me to come with you. I’m just trying to fix the mess I started in Kirkwall. I don’t expect anything from you. You spared me, and I didn’t expect that much.”

An onslaught of emotions hit Hawke at once, and she recoiled, holding in a cry of frustration. Why–why was it so maddening when Anders talked like that? Like she was doing him a service by not fucking killing him? He’d assumed she would. His first instinct, his first guess as it were, was death. He evidently thought so little of Hawke, and more unbearably, so little of himself, that he guessed she would execute him for the explosion of the Chantry.

“I’m a dead man walking, Hawke,” Anders murmured.

”Not as long as I have my say in the matter,” she snapped back. Anders shook his head as he watched her over the flickering fire. Hawke clenched her fist and it sputtered out, plunging them back into the dark again–and nobody spoke another word for the rest of the night, the imaginary space carved into stone between them colder than any Fereldan winter could aspire to be.


	2. The Stains of Guilt

Come morning, Hawke and Anders had settled into their old, polished routine; every morning was identical on the run. They would each wake when the sky had only just been breached by a tiny crevice of pale light sitting on the horizon, Anders collecting their respective supplies and bags while Hawke stripped their campsite of the barriers she’d laid out. Her magic, rigid and stable in standing as a fortress would be, was uniquely suited for protective spells; it crawled and crackled inside her, a low hum she had learned early on to tolerate, for its presence would never leave a mage unless they were maleficarum or were irreversibly cut from the Fade.  
  
Together, they would disassemble the tents they’d pitched the night before, strap their armor on, take their staffs, and set off on the nearest convenient path to their planned village-stop. It was an endeavor that could wear down a person, day after wretched day, chipping away relentlessly at them until they dulled and turned dead inside. Hawke knew because she had gone dull. She wasn’t a creature who could bare repetition or monotony; noble or no, Hawke had deliberately sketched out her seven years in Kirkwall so each second was a whirlwind of thrills, her hands busy either fighting, fiddling or fucking, her mind persistently locked onto a dozen different tasks. Her pattern, though, had left her unready for the _boredom_ of fugitive life. 

Varric’s epic adventure sagas set Hawke up with visions of daring exploits, painting a glorious portrait of wandering rebels who bowed to no authority and relied on no outside protection while they sailed or took to horseback to see the distant sights of Antiva, Rivain, _bloody Seheron._ He ought to be sued for inaccuracy. Sure, they’d had their closer calls–including the time when Anders wandered off to pet a stray cat and basically embraced the town’s local templar when the two collided–but mostly it was putting one foot in front of the other. Perhaps it was a forgivable toil when the fugitive of choice had a companion, but Hawke oft forgot she did.  
  
Anders’s words were scarce and wary when he resolved to speak. They conversed about where they would camp, where they would hunt or fish, who would chop wood for the fire; menial chores of uninspiring consequence. Besides the odd midnight-awakening last night, they hadn’t tackled any of the grave complications between them–her knife at his back, the Chantry in smoke and devastation, the friends who had slowly split off from their defacto leader and her partner for varying reasons and left them to choke on the reticence atop their tongues.

So, Hawke was vulnerable to the beast of her thoughts.

She couldn’t muffle the what-ifs floating about in her idle mind. She wondered if Justice had gotten inside her too. If her mana had intensified after lingering in the presence of a walking fragment of the Fade, if demons were enticed not by her failings and her vices but by the invisible Fade-touched parts of her, the tendrils that had hooked into her and bled her dry of her certainty. She wondered how hard and long she would fight until the unconquerable power of the Chantry’s full forces crushed her like one of those horned giants would crush an anthill; to be fair, she was harboring Thedas’s most prolific criminal, and despite hating the Templar Order, she would never call the soulless bastards slackers.  
  
Of course, they’d be better off if they could steer clear of mage and templar encampments, and refrain from thumbing their wanted noses at the Templars by planting themselves in the core regions of the rebellion, but Anders had demanded one stipulation from her since being spared–and it was that he wanted to assist them. His fellow brothers and sisters who had shattered the shackles of their Circle. He had looked so serious she couldn’t deny him–eyes ethereal blue, clenching his staff, jaw tense, his stance poised to confront the past remnants of a prison they had tried to persuade him was a home, an Order of tyrants they called protectors. 

She’d never known the version of Anders they tossed in solitary confinement for a year, but she envisioned he had such ferocity in spades.

 _“I need you to promise me, Hawke,” Anders whispered roughly in a rush of breath, asking for her approval when he knew that he would damn well enact his plan without it if necessary. She was paralyzed under his smoldering glare. “Promise me you’ll help me atone. If the Maker takes me to His side tomorrow, I can’t go knowing I haven’t done all I can for the mages they slaughter as they please.”_  
  
Anders, Justice and Vengeance; three in unison.  
  
“Hawke.”

“Mm?” _Then again, why am I wasting my energy angsting over my Maker-cursed love life? I should be frolicking through the forests smelling flowers and picking weeds. Merrill could give me frolicking lessons if she were here. There’s a girl who would adore frolicking. But..wait, is that stereotyping? Do the Dalish frolick? I can’t say I’ve_ seen _her frolick in Kirkwall’s alienage. Plus, she would trip over that twine if she—_  
  
“Hawke!”

Hawke blinked blearily, pursing her lips in confusion as she looked to the disembodied noise. Anders perplexed her. He stood off the cobblestone trail, features pinched in annoyance and worry. Brilliant combination. 

Titus sniffed eagerly around the base of the tree Anders currently rested his shoulder upon, and Hawke was a supportive parent, so she smiled widely when he tilted his head at her in curiosity.  
  
”Do a lot of travelers go down this road?” 

She shrugged a shoulder. Falkeik, their destination, was a minuscule blob on her map; so astoundingly backwater it made Lothering seem stately in comparison. “There’s a road. Give them credit where it’s due. They must have half a carriage coming through a year, at minimum.” 

Anders’s frown deepened. “There’s a footprint here, off-path.” Hawke clambered over to see if he was going blind in his old age, and indeed, there was the footprint of boots caked in mud. Small for a grown person to leave, maybe a woman petite in her build or a teenager with a profound rebellious streak and a grudge against following roads. She got the hunch she was missing his message by quite a considerable breadth. 

“Maker’s breath, Hawke,” Anders muttered in exasperation. “Look past it. The Fade is thin here, like a wound only partly healed over. Can you feel the residual magic in the air?”  
  
Hawke expanded the field of her mana, a tingle of numbing pleasure washing down her spine when her magic melded with his and she received the brunt of his connection with Justice head-on. She was appreciative of their surge of warm amity when she sorted through said magic she had been forewarned about. Although she was expecting anything from just your normal secluded mage to leftovers of a blood magic ritual performed on the deserted road, she didn’t like those feelings any more than she would otherwise; it was a calculated method of harming herself, sweeping over such searing magic. Magic of the petrified and angry.   
  
“You think they were fleeing from templars?” She asked rhetorically, before her brain could presume command of what came out of her mouth. Anders humored her.  
  
”I’m _certain_ they were fleeing from templars.”

* * *

Hawke’s mood had been spoiled by their discovery on Falkiek’s highway. She jumped and frightened at every unintelligible sound they heard during the rest of the walk, and she suspected Anders was enjoying the reversal in their usual roles; he didn’t mock her for it, but his cheeriness was plenty proof for her to convict him. His stride was slower, gait considerably relaxed, and in each incidence of Hawke yelping at another snapping twig or singing bird and drawing her staff, he had to stifle his laughter in his sleeve before he could calm her without erupting in tears. He was oddly uninhibited with her freaked-out self. Tenderly clasping her shoulder or arm, coaxing her to lean a little into his body while his mana buzzed lightly. It was a hymn of solace and safety. _He_ was the hymn, as well as his magic.  
  
Embarrassed, Hawke didn’t see his gesture in poetic terms. After his fifth offense, she’d crossed her arms and huffed at him, blowing a strand of spiky black hair from her forehead. “What am I, a scared Mabari pup you need to soothe?”  
  
Anders’s grin was unabashed. Her stomach dropped in her gut, queasy glee flooding her from top to bottom. “Come on, that’s an insult to poor Titus. Mabaris aren’t so skittish.”

Falkiek could have been populated by verified Chantry saints. To Hawke, it was nonetheless ominous, the shabby buildings foreboding and invasion of the overgrowth into village square a sign of poor upkeep by ignorant laymen who probably booked a weekly mage-hate meeting on their calendars. Upon arrival, she scoured the town for any affronts to her person. They could have slapped her in the face if they wanted to ignite a less visceral outrage than what their flagrant notice, pinned boldly to the corner of a brick wall, accomplished.   
  
_WANTED MAN, GOES BY ‘ANDERS’  
Last seen in the City of Kirkwall, Free Marches.  
  
Description: blond, fair skin, brown eyes, scrawny but of tall stature; HIGHLY DANGEROUS.  
  
Wanted for APOSTASY and CRIMES OF TREASON.  
Thirty sovereigns reward for any information leading to the reveal of the apostate’s location or his apprehension. _

Hawke gritted her teeth. Behind her, the criminal’s chin bumped into her accidentally as he peered over her figure without lifting his feet an inch off the ground. “‘Scrawny?’ Really? They can’t give me a flattering description as compensation? Did they have to specify they’re searching for a _scrawny_ apostate?” Anders asked incredulously, his lip quirking in amusement.  
  
The town had been emptied of activity with evening looming over Falkiek’s residents, so when Hawke looked around and saw no strangers gawking at the crazy black-haired woman and her devilishly handsome yet disheveled associate, she deemed it all right to rip the notice right off the wall. She crinkled that blasted paper in her hand, shoving it in her pocket–she would’ve gladly incinerated it in her hands if they weren’t in a public area and if she wasn’t vigilant about lighting her own apparel on fire. “Tell you what,” she said darkly to Anders, “their description can serve as kindling.”

“Are you going to do that to every placard we see?” He trailed in Hawke’s stead as she scouted out the remainder of Falkiek. She found herself pausing on an uninteresting storefront; she was attracted to the ordinary, humble quality of this establishment, since it was exactly the brand of shop where templar spies and random wellsprings of peril were probably not going to be hanging out. Wiping the sweat off her clammy hands, she twisted around to pull Anders’s hood farther over the crown of his head. Whichever angle she examined him from, the man’s essence stubbornly screamed _rebel mage here!_

“Do me a favor and don’t talk, okay?” She pleaded. “Just–well, Maker, I don’t know, smile at the shopkeeper, show off your pretty eyelashes and don’t become best friends in the five minutes of our transaction.” Anders was markedly unimpressed, but when she gave him the saddest look she could muster up while laden with fatigue and impatient, he did a small nod of his head to agree. Right. No apostates here, oh no. They were just farmers..refuges? Tevinter magisters in-training sent to this Fereldan pithole to spread terror and distrust towards the southern Chantry in the gatherings of its staunch adherents. Shit, she needed to work on her talent for fabricating aliases. 

It was the same dance the Champion performed flawlessly at those pompous noble events and parties– _give them what they anticipate from you; but never too much or they’ll get iffy. Excessive normalcy is as damaging as being the standout circus show._ Nobles wanted prim and proper conduct paired with humor, unoffensive but bold enough to disarrange their boring lives. Villagers and regular folk wanted straightforward. _Give them what they want._  
  
Hawke steeled herself before she could lose her mettle and slipped inside the shop, Anders on her heels. They were greeted inside by an aging woman who could logically be her grandmother by merit of appearance; her charcoal-hair framed her face in waves, her bangs permitted to stay free while the rest was tied into elaborate braids in the back. She was wrinkled and strongly tanned from a lifetime of difficult manual labor, and her voice was a kindly but confident drawl, with a prominent rural Fereldan accent. “More newcomers, eh? I’m Cailin. I suppose you and your sweetheart are coming from the northern Marches? Kirkwall, Ostwick?”  
  
“I, um–“ Hawke sputtered, clearing her throat forcibly. “Yes–how did you—“

Cailin chuckled. “Relax, sweetie. We’ve got a load of foreigners coming through ‘ere now. The Circles ‘ave broken up and the templars ‘ave been useless at stopping the mages, so the Marchers are coming to Ferelden. Good for business–I’ve got more sales in the last month than I ever got in the last decade–but ‘is not good for the Maker-fearing soul to see the hungry folk dressed in rags. Awful, that is.”  
  
Hawke had to fight down her trepidation. The lady’s clarification–if not a lie–was clear and rational, and a fleeting passover revealed no apparent weapons on her, although she wasn’t totally sure of that assessment since the counter hid every trait of her body from her waist downwards. “Yeah, uh..” _Think of a name, any name._ “I’m Bethany, and this is my husband, Declan.” _Of-fucking-course the name that first occurs to you is the name of your dead sister._ She encircled an arm around Anders’s neck, hiding her pained grimace in the crook of his collarbone so she could compose herself. His fingers tentatively rubbed across her back. “We’re looking for some basic supplies for the road.”  
  
While she browsed those goods available to her, Cailin kept up a background rambling dialogue. Hawke only replied in distracted hums, far too fascinated by the colorful array of peculiar contraptions and ‘anti-mage charms’ on the shelves to mind leisurely gossip. It was when she was bent over a golden necklace advertised as being fireproof that the shopkeeper proposed the topic of rebellious mages again; and Cailin’s gossip was alarmingly less petty now. 

“You know, there was this scene yesterday in the town center. I’m glad you weren’t ‘ere to see it, Bethany, ‘cause it was like nothing Falkiek’s used to. Templars marched in, midday, with the sun shining down and they took him.” There was an excitement to how Cailin narrated. “The elf boy. Sean. He’d been living in town for maybe a week, at most. I knew the lad personally. Worked a couple odd jobs for me, seemed like a smart and polite lad, if not a bit rowdy for my liking. Old Haline took him in, claimed ‘he’s an orphan and needs a place to lay his head’. She’s always ‘ad a penchant for taking in strays, Maker bless her heart. Anyhow—“

Anders couldn’t maintain his silence anymore. “And you just stood by and watched this happen? None of the townspeople asked a single question, or defended him? What if he was innocent of the apostasy charges?” He asked heatedly.

The shopkeeper’s eyes narrowed, frowning in displeasure. “There was nothing we could’ve done. We were shocked. The templars snatched him right off Haline’s doorstep, and were gonna make off with him, when he cut his hand and these t-things rose out of thin air. Demons. _Blood magic._ They subdued him, with the Maker’s help, but..Andraste give me strength, it was horrifying. Never seen anything so gruesome.” She shuddered as if a particularly cold blow of wind had rattled her store’s windows.   
  
“Right.” Anders was solemn and thoughtful, thoughtful in the way he reserved exclusively for when he was going to do something that would make those beyond the mage underground quiver in their boots. Hawke stood there with her mouth open, fumbling for a course of action since her script had been broken clean in half. 

Then he moved.

Hawke could hardly dump more than a couple silvers on Cailin’s counter as apology before he took her arm and dragged her out of the shop. She mimicked baggage, being hauled limply by the other mage. Her world tipped upside down as daylight flashed into her vision and vanished suddenly once more when he pushed her into an alleyway. She came to with a dizzy pounding in her head, pressed against the wall and chest-to-chest with an immeasurably pissed Anders.

“It’s my fault. Every boy like him, mages in the Free Marches and Ferelden and Orlais, forced on the run from Templars–I caused their suffering.”  
  
Hawke growled. “So because you feel guilty, you intend to drag us on some hopeless escapade and put yourself in danger to rescue a blood mage—“

“—A _young_ blood mage! You heard her. The woman admitted herself he’s just a boy,” Anders cut her off, leaning in closer so his next words rang deafeningly in her ears, a whisper though they were. “You promised, Marian.” Not a judgement, nor an accusation; for it was the infallible truth. 

She _had_ promised him.


End file.
